Hot Reload Support

[flappyBug]

Hello! Thank you for developing such a great Lean documentation tool. I would like to ask if verso currently supports hot reload functionality? If not, is there any plan to add this feature in the future? Looking forward to your reply. Thank you very much!

[david-christiansen]

Can you say a bit more about what you mean?

[flappyBug]

As I've been using it, I've found that the workflow for previewing changes is a bit clunky and slows things down. Right now, to see a small change I've made, I have to:

1. Edit my .lean file.
2. Run lake build.
3. Run my project's executable (lake exe myproject) to generate the static files.
4. Switch to another terminal to run a Python server.
5. Switch to my browser and hit refresh.

This whole cycle takes a fair bit of time and really breaks the writing flow, especially when I'm just trying to fix a typo or rephrase a sentence.

It would be a massive improvement if there was a way to get instant feedback. I'm imagining something like a --watch flag for our project's executable, like lake exe demosite --watch.

This command could fire up a small, built-in web server and watch the source .lean files. When it detects a change, it would automatically re-run the site generation and tell the browser to refresh. This would wrap all the manual steps into one and make the authoring process feel much more fluid and interactive.

This kind of live-reload server is a pretty standard feature in other static site tools like Hugo or Jekyll, and I think it would be a fantastic addition to Verso. It would really help with the goal of making it an enjoyable tool to write with.

Just an idea I wanted to share. Thanks for all your hard work on this project

[david-christiansen]

A live-reload server would be great. There's no plan to build it right now, but it would be a wonderful thing to have.

It would require deeper Lake integration, because the site would need to be continuously recompiled as well as re-run.